Knights of the Technocracy

On the role and responsibilities of engineers.

Karl Marx is a terrible historian and economist, but an excellent social critic. For every insufferable and unsupported claim he makes about class distinctions, he offers a perceptive insight into the modern industrial experience.

“Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overseer and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself” (Marx and Engels, 14).

Although Marx and Engels aim this critique at capitalism, it is truly a critique of industry – for industry, technology, and owned capital overlap almost completely in a Venn diagram. Economy is produced at scale, scale is only made possible A: with sophisticated technology and B: when operated by bureaucratic processes. Sophisticated technology and bureaucratic processes both require central planners, and central planners must be owners in order to operate effectively. There you have capitalists and technocrats rolled into one.

As an aside, the Marxist idea above that I find most compelling is that a state reduced to economic transactions is not sufficient to cover the whole range of human value - hence the militant (or even mercenary) language. Yet to acknowledge that, one must almost by necessity believe in the transcendent - and the Marxist enterprise is one of materialism. One wonders what he might have given us if he were a devout Orthodox. But he wasn’t, and I’m not ready to tackle the Value Question today. What is important today is the notion of technocratic hierarchy.

I’m a mechanical engineer, and although I’m as Luddite as they come, I entered the field with an optimism about engineering that is nascent in the modern Western world. The Engineer has the secrets, the hidden knowledge that makes planes fly and computers run. The Engineer Designs Things. He is a kind of ex-nihilo wizard, even though his processes are highly repeatable. My schooling built this idea up as well: presenting theory after theory and problem after problem, my professors crafted me into a machine of abstract thought and scientific analysis.

When I entered the workforce, I saw that the industry taskmasters had different priorities. They were genuinely very interested in engineers. They paid them respectable salaries and provided them with generous budgets. They also trained them extensively in Lean Six Sigma, 5S, and the Toyota Production System. These efficiency doctrines provided us a framework by which to make Engineering decisions: how to identify muda (waste), how to “remove bodies” (automate out workers), and subject all design choices to payback period criteria (pure-profit motives).

A deeper and wider investigation into contemporary engineering jobs spoke to the same theme: Engineers as Bureaucrats. Nearly every job description I found included something about writing standard work documents or refining processes to the most economically efficient version possible. It quickly became clear that engineers were the primary tools of the corporate world to build profits. It was no longer about making better products, or new products, or reaching new customers, but about engineering products to within an inch of their lives to save money. The victims of this doctrine have been the workers, of whom nothing is now expected and nothing is now given; the customers, who have come to expect cheapness and obsolescence; and the supply chain, which has buckled for lack of margin and muscle.

Consider this excerpt from Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft:

“In the 1950’s, sociologists started pointing out a basic resemblance between Soviet and Western societies: in both there seemed to be an increasing number of jobs that were radically simplified. Both societies were industrial, and had a growing separation of planning from execution…observers noted that it proceeded from the imperatives of rational administration” (Crawford 37-38).

He goes on to quote Marxist Harry Braverman, who notes that “scientific management…enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the representative of management masquerading in the trappings of science.”

Management is usually incompetent in the area of technical expertise and especially in intimate craft knowledge, both of which drive production and ultimately profit. Managers desire that their imperatives result in one-to-one production effects, but without complete knowledge of the process, they cannot possibly achieve this control. I have known production supervisors who, although corrupt and hated by their managers, excelled in their jobs for many years because of their ground-level knowledge. Upper management resolves this issue and others like it by producing methodology doctrines for the engineering class, or the technical experts. The basic job of this class is to apply these doctrines to the work of the laborers, changing the nature of the process technology and the products themselves to promote standardized and fragmented work. Where craft knowledge is essential, the engineers record it, and where it is not, they replace it with brute automation. Engineers are thereby the Knights of the Technocracy, wresting control of production into the hands of the executive managers and, ultimately, financial speculators.

Engineers play a major role in the market composition, dictating the skillsets, knowledge, and incomes of a huge segment of the population while shifting market control to an elite class. But most engineers I have met do not characterize themselves in those terms, nor do they think about the broader implications of their workplace designs. We enjoy solving problems, content in our delight of making things work. Yet moving forward, I insist that we strive to make things work for everyone.

*Crawford, Matthew. Shop Class as Soulcraft. Penguin, 2009.

*Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.